News archive

Over 170,000 Jewish men and women were deported by the Nazis from the German Reich to ghettos or extermination camps, where most of them were murdered. These deportations are the focus of a new collection of sources assembled by Akim Jah from the International Tracing Service (ITS) and Marcus Gryglewski from the House...

In Melanie Haarmann’s family, no one ever said much about her grandfather’s brother Ernst Egon apart from: “He was killed in action.” Then she received a letter from the International Tracing Service (ITS). It said that the personal belongings the Nazis had taken from her great-uncle when they committed him to the...

In December 2018, Guy Allain’s daughter Brigitte received a very special package. It contained a wallet and two little strips of cloth. In the wallet there were two drawings. One is a scrap of squared paper with a pencil drawing of a cross with a heart at its center. The other, on a small slip of folded paper, is a...

H-Soz-Kult, a German-language experts’ forum for historians, has now published the proceedings of the international conference “Tracing and Documenting Victims of Nazi Persecution: History of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Context,”. In the detailed report, Jonas Nachtigall of the Leipzig Nazi Forced Labour...

Braulia Cánovas Mulero was only twenty when she joined the French resistance, taking on the code name “Monique.” In 1943, the Nazis arrested her in Perpignan and deported her to Germany. She was in various concentration camps, and finally liberated in Bergen-Belsen. Her wristwatch and ring remained among the personal...

Three portfolios in the holdings of the ITS document an attempt undertaken by an investigative committee of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in 1946/47 to give victims of the death marches from Flossenbürg their names back. According to the investigation report: “The real purpose for...

In the spring of 1940, the Nazis launched a special campaign to murder Jewish sanatoria patients. Five women living at the Bathildisheim home in Arolsen in Northern Hesse – some of them for many years already– were subsequently taken to the “Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt” (state sanatorium) in Giessen. They never...

January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Many of Germany’s soccer stadiums commemorate the persecution and murder of soccer players and club members by carrying out various actions on game days in late January. Back in 2004, the initiative !Nie wieder (Never Again) gave the impulse for this “German Soccer...

Miriam Shorer was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in 1946 and grew up in Israel as an only child with adoptive parents—happy, but without a biological family, or so she thought. Thanks to information from the ITS, it turned out that she has a half-sister and an aunt in the U.S., as well as cousins, nieces and nephews....

Until their digitization, the files pertaining to displaced persons were completely ordinary working materials, and as such subject to a lot of wear and tear. ITS staff members unpacked, leafed through and made copies of them, then repacked them for further safekeeping. With the aid of a specialized company, the ITS...